1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image-printing system using a peer-to-peer network, particularly to a system preferred to realize an image-providing service of sharing an image between restricted persons and allowing the persons to easily get prints, and a user terminal unit used for the system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Most of digital-camera users move image data from a recording medium of a memory card or the like to a hard disk of a personal computer when the recording medium becomes full as a result of taking pictures. When the total number of images stored in the hard disk is small, there is no problem. However, when the total number of images increases, it is difficult to extract a desired image from the hard disk and finally, it is impossible to extract an image.
This is because many image files having the same file name are present on the hard disk of the personal computer and thereby, it is impossible to retrieve an image in accordance with its file name. Even if a duplicate file name is not present, it is difficult to get the contents of an image from the file name because the file name automatically provided by a digital camera is normally constituted by a combination string of alphabetical letters and numerals and it is rare to remember the file name of the desired image. Moreover, it requires a lot of time to check all thumbnails by image-viewing software (image viewer) and therefore, it is not realistic to check them by the software.
Furthermore, though it is possible to manually add an identifiable name to a file name, the identifiable-name-inputting step requires a lot of time. Therefore, this method is not realistic either. As a result, valuable image data is stored in a hard disk while it is not used.
However, the number of pleasures of sharing image data on a network slowly increases in recent years. For example, by uploading image data to a predetermined server and e-mailing a URL of the image-storing place to another person, the image data can be shared by a plurality of persons (Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 11-224228 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,974,401).
In general, because the storage capacity (space) of the server is limited, the client must decrease the capacity of image data by occasionally decreasing the number of pixels of the image to be opened to the public or compressing the image data if necessary while considering the capacity of the server. Moreover, it is necessary to perform uploading whenever replacing images and the time and labor for uploading are necessary.
Furthermore, the number of cases for ordering prints of image data via a network has increased in recent years. Most of the cases use a style of collecting orders on one place or a plurality of places and printing the orders and delivering the prints to houses of clients by mail (U.S. Pat. No. 6,017,157 and Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 10-78619).
In the case of the above-described conventional print-ordering system (system of collecting orders on a place), when the number of orders increases, the processing at the place becomes a bottleneck and the cost for removing the bottleneck also increases. Moreover, there is a disadvantage that the service cost increases by a mail cost (cost of delivery to client's house).
Moreover, there is a problem that even if a client understands that an image can be processed in accordance with the user's taste, it is impossible to easily reflect the processing condition of the image on a print order. That is, a system is generally used in which even if a client performs favorite image correction (processing), the image-processing parameter is adjusted at the print station side without considering the information on the client's image correction so that the finish quality original to the print station is realized.